Joan McAlpine MSP is a clever person. You have to be to clever be a journalist, broadcaster and author. You don’t, it appears, need to be clever to be an MSP however. In one of her first columns for her blog at the Daily Record she compared the relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK to that of a married couple where the husband, through close and insulting control of the household budget, abuses his wife. The comparison is remarkably inappropriate. You can read it here.
The first five paragraphs will be familiar to those who have heard women speak about how every aspect of their lives were controlled by abusive men. It is really surprising to me that a even a relatively new MSP (and certainly a journalist) thinks that scoring a political point using domestic abuse as the example would be a nice thing to do. Can you imagine how a women seeking support to from her MSP to get out of an abusive relationship will feel now? Especially of they happen to have the misfortune of being English themselves.
What surprised me even more (although it really shouldn’t have) than the ridiculous piece written by Joan McAlpine was how every criticism on Twitter of the piece was shot down, the criticiser insulted, the piece defended, given a different meaning and even questioning the idea that a man controlling the household budget and belittling the wife was abuse or not. It is, it really really is. If this is the nationalist vision of Scotland, where domestic abuse is defined only by the level of violence, I will be definitely voting no in the referendum. If only to protect Scottish women.
It is interesting that some of the defenders of the article first cited the fact that the article was the the “Scottish Labour” newspaper, the Daily Record. In fact, this belief has made it into the articles defending the piece like here and here. SNP Glasgow MSP Humza Yousef peddled this line as well until I pointed out I’m a Liberal and not a Labour supporting Record reader.
Now, as a Liberal I have no Scottish newspaper to call home so my outrage is not based on where it was written. Nor was it because I against independence. If the vote were tomorrow I’d probably vote yes. I am outraged because I am a Liberal and I believe that comparing domestic abuse to the Scotland/rUK relationship is an insult to every women who has been abused.
I am an internet geek. I have been online since the mid-1990s. First of all with Usenet, text MUDs and ICQ. What interests me is the anger and the hate that those wanting to have an independent Scotland show online, mostly anonymously. For most of my time online people have insulted other people from behind their avatar but it was always about technical issues and preferences of one specification over another. Now, and online nationalists are an exemplar of this, its about hate and hatred of someone and their position on independence. I don’t hate a single nationalist and won’t hate them for voting for independence. What is clear is that the same cannot be said for the online nationalists if someone says they are voting to stay in the union, or heaven help them, be critical of an SNP MSP who thinks Scotland is like an abused wife.